How much is your view of the world shaped by what you see on television? On average, Americans spend more than 150 hours watching television every month, and it is called “programming” for a reason. If you allow anyone to pour ideas and information into your mind for five hours a day, it is going to change how you look at reality. Everyone has an agenda, and every single news program, television show and movie is trying to alter your views. Sadly, our society has become absolutely addicted to media, and the mainstream media is completely dominated by the elite. In fact, about 90 percent of the programming that comes through your television is controlled by just 6 gigantic media corporations. Most of us are willingly plugging ourselves into this “propaganda matrix” that is completely dominated by the elite for several hours each day, and that gives them an enormous amount of power over the rest of us.

In Part I and Part II of this series, I discussed how the elite use money as a tool to dominate the planet. Today, we are going to talk about how they use information. If you control what people think, then you control a society. And through their vast media empires, the elite are able to shape how we all think to a frightening degree.

Just think about it. What do we talk about with our family, our friends and our co-workers? To a large extent, those conversations are about movies, television shows, something that we just saw on the news or a sporting event that just took place. The reason why we talk about certain things is because the mainstream media gives those things attention, and other things we ignore because the mainstream media does not make them seem to be important.

The mainstream media literally sets the agenda for our society, and it would be difficult to overstate the power that is in their hands. And as I mentioned above, the mainstream media is almost entirely controlled by just 6 colossal corporations. The following list of these 6 corporate giants comes from one of my previous articles, and this is just a sampling of the media properties that they each own…

In essence, Americans are spending most of their waking hours plugged in to something.

And if you only add together “live television” and “time-shifted television”, Americans are spending an average of more than five hours each day just watching television.

Of course many of us spend countless hours on the Internet as well. It has been estimated that 54,907 Google searches are conducted, 7,252 tweets are posted, 125,406 YouTube videos are viewed, and 2,501,018 emails are sent out every single second.

You may have guessed this already, but most of the news and information that we consume on the Internet is also controlled by the elite…

Overall, the top 10 publishers — together owning around 60 news sites — account for 47% of total online traffic to news content last year, with the next-biggest 140 publishers accounting for most of the other half, SimilarWeb found.

The biggest online news publisher for the U.S. audience was MSN, owner of MSN.com, with just over 27 billion combined page views across mobile and desktop, followed by Disney Media Networks, owner of ESPN and ABC News, with 25.9 billion.

This is why the “alternative media” is so important. All over America and all over the world, people are waking up and realizing that they aren’t getting the truth from the mainstream media, and they are hungry for truly independent sources of information.

The only way that we are ever going to be able to throw off the insidious system of control that the elite have established is by winning the information war. We are literally in a constant battle for hearts and minds, and the good news is that we have made a lot of progress. Over the past decade we have “red pilled” millions upon millions of people, but we still have a long way to go.

Faith in the corporate media is dwindling, and the elite are deeply concerned about this. The Internet has allowed ordinary people like us to communicate on a mass scale, and this has never been the case before in human history. We have a window of opportunity to fight back against the elite, and we must not let this opportunity pass us by.

We are literally engaged in a battle for the future of this planet, and let us never waver in our pursuit of victory.

You can either follow the herd of you can decide to find your own path. One of the things that greatly frustrates me is that so many Americans allow other people to do their thinking for them. We have become a nation of sheeple, and the vast majority of the shepherds that we are relying on for guidance are frauds and imposters. The blind are leading the blind, and we are slowly but surely committing national suicide. If a lot more of us don’t start to learn to think for ourselves, I fear that the vast majority of the population will never wake up until it is far too late.

Let me ask you a very simple question.

What is on your mind today?

If you are not preoccupied with work or with family matters, then you are probably thinking about something that you have been fed through the mainstream media. Just think about this for a few moments. When you are sitting around the dinner table or you are chatting with someone at work, what do you tend to talk about? If you are like most people, many of your conversations will be about something that you saw on the news, a new movie that you just watched, or a sporting event that has just happened.

Most of the time, we believe that certain things are important because someone else has told us that they are important.

And the most prominent voices of all are the six gigantic media corporations that control about 90 percent of the news, information and entertainment that we get through our televisions. I know that statistic is a bit hard to believe, so let me share a little excerpt from a fact checking website called truthorfiction.com…

Summary of eRumor:

Six corporations own 90% of news media companies in America.

The Truth:

This claim is true.

News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS and Comcast own 90% of the TV stations, radio stations, movies, magazines and newspapers that 277 million Americans rely on for news and entertainment.

Of course those six corporate behemoths are owned by the elite of the world, and that is why “the news” never seems to change very much no matter where you get it.

It is imperative that we understand that everyone has an agenda. Every single movie, television show, documentary and news program is trying to shape how you think. Sadly, many people completely disengage their mental filters once they sit down in front of the television, and they just passively consume whatever “programming” that is offered to them without even thinking twice about where it is coming from.

Well, the truth is that at some point a big media gatekeeper somewhere decided that this is something that we should all be focusing on.

But of course there are thousands of pressing issues that would be far more worthy of our attention. The key is to keep us all confused and distracted so that we can never focus on what is truly important.

One of the biggest reasons why we are so easily controlled as a society is because our system of public education does not teach critical thinking skills to our young people. Instead, most educational time is spent on trying to memorize facts and figures that can be regurgitated when it is time to take a test. And any time that is spent on the “why questions” is usually spent forcing “progressive values” down the throats of our students. No wonder our young people are rapidly falling behind the rest of the industrialized world.

Did you ever see the big Hollywood film that was entitled “Idiocracy“? Sometimes I feel like I am permanently trapped inside that movie. If you ask people why they do the things that they do on a daily basis, most of them cannot give you a coherent answer.

I am even discovering that this is true in the world of politics. I have been asking people who they are planning to vote for in different races here in Idaho and why they plan to vote that way. Sadly, most voters cannot give me any sort of a coherent answer. Most of the time people seem to be backing a certain candidate “because that is what everybody else seems to be doing”.

And something that greatly disturbs me is how we tend to put political leaders up on pedestals. If they are on our “team”, we tend to shower them with worship and pretend that they can’t do anything wrong. But if they are on the other team, we tend to throw as much mud as we possibly can.

Instead of being obsessed with personalities, we need to stand on our principles instead. If our leaders do things that are right, then we should praise those actions. But if they do what is wrong, then we should be willing to hold them accountable.

I have been having a number of conversations about “being red-pilled” lately, and if you ever watched “The Matrix” then you know exactly what I am talking about. Most people out there still don’t seem to realize that the world system is built on a pyramid of lies. From a very early age, we are told lie after lie, and once you start to “wake up” one of the first responses is often intense anger.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, I would encourage you to start questioning everything. Once you really start digging, you will quickly discover that many of the “truths” that society takes for granted are not actually so solid after all.

If you seek the truth with all of your heart, you will find it, and it will set you free.

But breaking free of the programming that the world system is constantly feeding us is the first step, and that is not always easy to do.

If you allow someone to pump hours of “programming” into your mind every single day, it is inevitable that it is eventually going to have a major impact on how you view the world. In America today, the average person consumes approximately 10 hours of information, news and entertainment a day, and there are 6 giant media corporations that overwhelmingly dominate that market. In fact, it has been estimated that somewhere around 90 percent of the “programming” that we constantly feed our minds comes from them, and of course they are ultimately controlled by the elite of the world. So is there any hope for our country as long as the vast majority of the population is continually plugging themselves into this enormous “propaganda matrix”?

Just think about your own behavior. Even as you are reading this article the television might be playing in the background or you may have some music on. Many of us have gotten to the point where we are literally addicted to media. In fact, there are people out there that become physically uncomfortable if everything is turned off and they have to deal with complete silence.

It has been said that if you put garbage in, you are going to get garbage out. It is the things that we do consistently that define who we are, and so if you are feeding your mind with hours of “programming” from the big media corporations each day, that is going to have a dramatic affect on who you eventually become.

These monolithic corporations really do set the agenda for what society focuses on. For example, when you engage in conversation with your family, friends or co-workers, what do you talk about? If you are like most people, you might talk about something currently in the news, a television show that you watched last night or some major sporting event that is taking place.

Virtually all of that news and entertainment is controlled by the elite by virtue of their ownership of these giant media corporations.

I want to share some numbers with you that may be hard to believe. They come directly out of Nielsen’s “Total Audience Report“, and they show how much news and entertainment the average American consumes through various methods each day…

Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes

Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes

Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes

Using a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes

When you add all of those numbers together, it comes to a grand total of more than 10 hours.

And keep in mind that going to movie theaters, playing video games and reading books are behaviors that are not even on this list.

What in the world are we doing to ourselves?

The combination of watching live television and watching time-shifted television alone comes to a total of more than five hours.

If you feed five hours of something into your mind day after day, it is going to change you. There is no way around that. You may think that you are strong enough to resist the programming, but the truth is that it affects all of us in very subtle ways that we do not even understand.

And as I mentioned above, there are just six giant corporations that account for almost all of the programming that we receive through our televisions. Below is a list of these six corporations along with a sampling of the various media properties that they own…

Fortunately, those enormous media conglomerates do not have quite the same monopoly over the Internet, but we are starting to see a tremendous amount of consolidation in the online world as well. Just check out these numbers…

Overall, the top 10 publishers — together owning around 60 news sites — account for 47% of total online traffic to news content last year, with the next-biggest 140 publishers accounting for most of the other half, SimilarWeb found.

The biggest online news publisher for the U.S. audience was MSN, owner of MSN.com, with just over 27 billion combined page views across mobile and desktop, followed by Disney Media Networks, owner of ESPN and ABC News, with 25.9 billion.

The battle for the future of this nation is a battle for the hearts and minds of individuals.

And it is hard to see how things will be turned in a dramatically different direction as long as most of us are willingly feeding our hearts and minds with hours of “programming” that is controlled by the elite each day.

The good news is that there are signs of an awakening. More Americans than ever are becoming disenchanted with the mainstream media, and this is showing up in recent survey numbers. Here is one example…

Trust in the news media is being eroded by perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans’ skepticism about what they read on social media.

Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public’s view of other institutions.

As Americans (and people all over the world) have lost confidence in the mainstream media, they have been seeking out other sources of news and entertainment. This has greatly fueled the rise of the alternative media, and the dozens of websites all over the Internet where this article will ultimately be published are examples of this explosion.

You can only enslave people for so long. Ultimately, they will want to break free of the chains that are holding them back and they will want to find the truth.

In this day and age, it is absolutely imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves. If you find that you are still addicted to the “programming” that the giant media corporations are feeding you, I would encourage you to start unplugging from the matrix more frequently.

The average American spends more than 10 hours a day using an electronic device. And most of that activity is not even interactive. The vast majority of the time we are just passively absorbing content that someone else has created. This very much reminds me of the movie “the Matrix”, but with a twist. Instead of humans being forcefully connected to “the Matrix”, we are all willingly connecting ourselves to it. There is a giant system that defines our reality for us, and the length of time that the average American spends connected to it just continues to keep growing. In fact, there are millions upon millions of us that simply do not “feel right” unless there is at least something on in the background. Just think about it. How much time do you spend each day with all electronic devices completely turned off? Thanks to technology, we live at a time when more news, information and entertainment is at our fingertips than ever before, and we are consuming more of it than ever before. But this also gives a tremendous amount of power to those that create all of this news, information and entertainment. As I have written about previously, more than 90 percent of the “programming” that we absorb is created by just 6 enormously powerful media corporations. Our conversations, attitudes, opinions and belief systems are constantly being shaped by those entities. Unfortunately, most of us are content to just sit back and let it happen.

The following numbers regarding the media consumption habits of average Americans come directly from Nielsen’s most recent “Total Audience Report“. The amount of time per day that Americans spend using these devices is absolutely staggering…

Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes

Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes

Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes

Using a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes

When you add it all up, the average American spends more than 10 hours a day plugged into the Matrix.

You have heard the old saying “you are what you eat”, right?

Well, the same applies to what we put into our brains.

When you put garbage in, you are going to get garbage out.

In my recent article entitled “It’s Official: Americans R Stupid“, I discussed how the U.S. population is being systematically “dumbed down” and how we are now one of the least intelligent industrialized nations on the entire planet.

A big contributor to our intellectual and social demise is the Matrix that has been constructed all around us.

Virtually every television show, movie, song, book, news broadcast and talk show is trying to shape how you view reality. Whether you realize it or not, you are constantly being bombarded with messages about what is true and what is not, about what is right and what is wrong, and about what really matters and what is unimportant. Even leaving something out or ignoring something completely can send an extremely powerful message.

In this day and age, it is absolutely imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves. But instead, most people seem more than content to let the Matrix do their thinking for them. If you listen carefully, you will notice that most of our conversations with one another are based on programming from the Matrix. We all love to talk about the movie that we just saw, or what happened on the latest reality show, or what some famous celebrity is doing, or what we saw on the news that morning. The things that matter to us in life are the things that the Matrix tells us should matter.

And if someone comes along with information that contradicts the Matrix, that can cause anger and confusion.

I can’t tell you how many times someone has said something like the following to me…

“If that was true I would have seen it on the news.”

To many people, the Matrix is the ultimate arbiter of truth in our society, and so anything that contradicts the Matrix cannot possibly be accurate.

Fortunately, more people than ever are waking up enough to realize that they have a choice.

It is kind of like that moment in the Matrix when Neo is being offered the red pill and the blue pill.

Admittedly, a lot of people that do begin to wake up choose to take the blue pill and go back to sleep.

But there are so many others that are grabbing the red pill. That is why we have seen such an explosion in the popularity of the alternative media in recent years. Millions of people all over the planet now understand that they are not getting the truth from the Matrix and they are hungry for real information.

Yes, the Internet is being used for unspeakable evil, but it can also be used for great good. The Internet has allowed ordinary people like you and I to communicate on a mass scale like never before in history. The Internet has allowed us to reclaim at least some of the power that we have lost to the Matrix. I don’t know how long this period of history will last, so we should make full use out of this great tool while we still have it.

On my own website, I have felt called to mainly focus on economics in recent years. And I will continue to chronicle economic conditions as we descend into the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history. What is coming is going to be worse than 2008, it is going to be worse than the Great Depression, and it is ultimately going to be worse than most Americans would ever dare to imagine.

But I also want to take my readers on a journey down the rabbit hole.

Our world is about to get really, really strange, and I would like to be a light in the chaos.

Yes, I believe that great darkness is coming. But I also believe that a great awakening is coming.

Personally, I believe that it is a great privilege to be alive at this time in human history.

It is a time of great evil, but it is also a time of great opportunity.

It is a time when everything that can be shaken will be shaken, but it will also be a time when those that stand for what is right will shine like the stars.

So what do you think about all of this? Please feel free to add your two cents by posting a comment below…

Do you believe that you really think for yourself? Did you come up with your attitudes, opinions and beliefs on your own, or are they continually being shaped and molded by someone else? Could it be possible that you and everyone around you is actually hooked into a real life version of “the matrix” that is constantly defining your reality for you? Sadly, the truth is that almost all of us have willingly hooked ourselves into a colossal media system that literally tells us what to think. In the United States today, the average American watches 153 hours of television a month. We also spend huge amounts of time watching movies, surfing the Internet, reading books and magazines, playing video games and listening to music. Many Americans are so addicted to being “connected” that they will actually become physically uncomfortable if they are at home and there is total silence. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in a previous article, somewhere around 90 percent of the “information” that we are allowing to be endlessly pumped into our heads is owned by just 6 gigantic media corporations. So could it be possible that the thousands of hours of “news and entertainment” that you are allowing these gigantic corporations to fill your head with each year is having an effect on you? Does the mainstream media have more control over you than you ever dreamed possible? If you want to continue on in blissful ignorance, stop reading now, but if you want to take “the red pill”, keep on reading because the further down the rabbit hole you go, the stranger that things get.

When you go to work or to school in the morning, what is everyone talking about?

Usually, people are talking about something that they saw on television or that they heard about in the news.

In our society today, the limited interactions that we do have with other people are usually defined by our mutual connection to the media.

The mainstream media literally defines for us what is important and what is not. If the mainstream media does not talk about something, then it simply does not matter.

I don’t know how many times over the years I have heard someone tell me some version of the following statement: “If that was true we would have heard about it on the news.”

Has anyone ever said something similar to you?

The funny thing is that most of the time I won’t even mention something important that I may have heard in one of my articles unless I can back it up with a “mainstream source”, and I don’t even trust the mainstream media.

I know that the mainstream media often distorts the facts and often tells outright lies, but I regularly link to them because that gives my articles more “credibility” in the eyes of those that are still fully hooked into the matrix.

In a world where the big media corporations have so much power, is there any hope for us?

As long as the big corporations that control the media are dominating and controlling the conversation, is there any chance that there will ever be a mass awakening among the American people?

Our young people seem particularly addicted to being constantly “connected” to the media matrix that is being constructed all around us. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article by Daniel Taylor…

According to a 2010 LA Times report, young people spend on average 53 hours a week watching TV, playing video games, and sitting at the computer.

Wow – our young people spend more than 200 hours a month connected to the mainstream media?

But we only have about 480 waking hours a month to work with.

If they are being exposed to that amount of continuous propaganda, what hope do our young people have?

In the old days, kids actually played with each other in the streets and adults actually left their homes to interact with one another.

But these days we spend nearly all of our time sitting passively in our homes staring at flickering screens.

Is that a sign of a healthy society?

We were created to be social creatures. We were designed to love and to be loved. But these days people “love” their favorite sports teams or they “love” their favorite television shows but we have an increasingly difficult time having real relationships with each other.

Meanwhile, the global elite rely on the mainstream media to keep us distracted and to control the boundaries of public discourse. Most of the time, the mainstream media focuses on the latest celebrity scandal or the latest dogfights between the Republicans and the Democrats and they systematically ignore many of the more important things that are taking place out there.

Let me just give you one example of how the mainstream media shapes the news. For decades, there was almost a complete and total media blackout on the Bilderberg Group meetings that happen every year. Top newspaper executives from the United States would actually attend these meetings, but then their newspapers would not say a single word about them.

If anyone out there did bring up “the Bilderberg Group”, they were dismissed as wacky “conspiracy theorists” and were told that it simply does not exist.

Of course now we all know that it does exist, although the mainstream media in the U.S. still mostly ignores it. In fact, this has been by design. The following is what David Rockefeller is alleged to have said during a Bilderberg Group meeting back in 1991…

We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. … It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.

Even today, many prominent “journalists” in the U.S. mock people when they bring up the Bilderberg Group. For example, Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC says that he is “way too lazy” to look into the Bilderberg Group and that he “doesn’t know about it, so it must not exist”.

Instead of telling us what is really going on in the world, the mainstream media keeps us endlessly distracted. The following are just a few of the headlines that can be found on the front pages of major mainstream news sites right now…

Wow – those are some examples of some really hard-hitting journalism right there.

So why do most Americans continue to fall for this nonsense?

Sadly, part of the reason is because we have become so “dumbed down” as a society.

Recently, the Guardian conducted an evaluation of the reading level of every State of the Union address in U.S. history. What they found is that Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses have had the second lowest reading level average in history, and that in general the reading levels of the speeches have been significantly declining over time.

But it is not just our presidents that appear to be getting stupider. The truth is that our public education system is a total joke at this point. Many of our high school students are as dumb as a rock, and if you can believe it, 23 percent of all Americans cannot even read beyond a fourth-grade level.

Of course the elite are quite pleased with this, because a stupid public is a public that is easier to dominate.

When a large segment of the population can barely read and is accustomed to letting others do their thinking for them, it becomes easier to lie.

Of course most of you that are reading this know that is a flat-out lie. The charts in this article clearly show that the number of Americans on food stamps is at an all-time high and the percentage of the population that is on food stamps is at an all-time high.

Back in 1983, less than a third of all Americans lived in a household that got money from the federal government each month, Now, an all-time high 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives money from the government each month.

For many more stats and charts that demonstrate the stunning growth of government dependence, please see this article and this article.

Sadly, the truth doesn’t seem to matter too much to the media these days. The mainstream media tends to be incredibly arrogant, and most of the time they don’t even pretend to be “objective” or “neutral” anymore.

Fortunately, more Americans than ever are becoming dissatisfied with the mainstream media and are starting to seek out alternative sources of information. According to a recent Gallup poll, the level of trust that the American public has in the mainstream media is now at an all-time low.